Silesians

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Silesians
Total population	220,000 (nationality declarations)
Regions with significant populations	Poland: 173,200 (2002), Czech Republic: 44,446 (1991)
Language	Silesian, Polish, German, Czech.
Religion	Catholicism.
Related ethnic groups	Poles

Silesians (Silesian: Ślônzoki; Polish: Ślązacy; German: Schlesier) are the West Slavic inhabitants of Silesia. Due to extensive Polonization, there has been some debate over whether or not the Silesians constitute a distinct ethnic group. Nevertheless, more than 170,000 people declared Silesian ethnicity in the Polish national census in 2002, making them the largest minority group in Poland.

The term Silesian can also be applied in a more general manner to describe an inhabitant of Silesia, regardless of ethnicity.

[edit] History

Settled by Slavic peoples circa 500 A.D., Silesia has been long contested by various peoples, states and principalities. The constant shifting of Silesia between Polish and German control over several centuries resulted in the multilingual Silesians developing a separate culture that borrowed heavily from both Polish and German.

In the Middle Ages, Silesia was a Piast duchy, which subsequently became a possession of the Bohemian crown under the Holy Roman Empire in the 14th century and passed with that crown to the Habsburg Monarchy of Austria in 1526. In 1742, most of Silesia was seized by King Frederick the Great of Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession. This part of Silesia constituted the Province of Silesia (later the Prussian provinces of Upper and Lower Silesia) until 1945.

Following World War II, the majority of Silesia was incorporated into Poland, with smaller regions remaining in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Millions of Silesia's ethnic German inhabitants were subsequently expelled, but those Silesians classified by the Polish authorities as "autochthons" or "ethnic Poles insufficiently aware of their Polishness" were allowed to remain, after being were sifted out from the ethnic Germans by a process of "national verification".^[1] In order to qualify, it was enough to speak some of the Upper Silesian dialect, or just to have a Slavic-sounding surname. Many such Silesians were allowed to remain in the city of Opole.

During the Communist era, the Polish government consistently emphasized ethnic homogeneity. As a result, the minority Silesians were heavily Polonized. Nearly 600,000 Silesians emigrated to West Germany during this time.

Since the end of Communist rule in Poland, there have been calls for greater political representation for the Silesian ethnic minority. In 1997, a Katowice law court registered the Union of People of Silesian Nationality (ZLNS) as the political representative organization of the Silesian ethnic minority, but after two months the registration was revoked by a regional court.

[edit] Language

Silesian (Upper Silesian) is spoken by the Silesian ethnic group. According to the last census in Poland (2002), some 70,000 people declared Silesian as their first language.

There is some contention over whether Silesian is a dialect or a language in its own right. A majority of Slavic linguists consider Silesian to be merely a prominent regional dialect of Polish. However, some people regard it as a separate language belonging to the West Slavic branch of Slavic languages, together with Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian, and other Lekhitic languages, as well as Czech and Slovak.

[edit] References